How to Convert SID to Username and Vice Versa

In Windows environment, each domain and local user, a group or other security objects are assigned a unique identifier — Security Identifier or SID. It is an SID, but not the user name, that is used to control access to different resources: network shares, registry keys, file system objects, etc. In this article we’ll show some simple ways to get SID by username and the reverse procedure – how to determine Windows username by SID.

To translate username to SID you can use an excellent tool from Sysinternals kit — PsGetSid. But you will have to download it and install on each computer manually.